In a radically changed and still changing world, parents, schools and pupils have had to adapt to a new teaching and learning modality. Working parents have faced the competing demands of employment ...and home-schooling, and schools provided support to pupils through online platforms and other resources. A qualitative approach elicited the views and experiences of working parents through a social media parents' group in Northern Ireland (NI). Only well-educated mothers responded revealing their extreme lack of confidence and pedagogical skills, complete exhaustion, frayed family relationships, and acute concern about children's educational loss and its future implications, particularly those for whom public examinations were imminent. Communication between teachers and both pupils and parents was deemed crucial, as were greater clarity from teachers on tasks set, less screen time, daily live interaction, feedback on work done, and more printed resources from schools to avoid undue expense for parents, especially those with children of different ages in different education sectors. Much more effective home-schooling could be facilitated if government required employers to arrange flexible working hours, at least for one parent. However, the creation of a daily structure that included lessons and leisure, the latter both indoors and outdoors, was beneficial and therapeutic.
This paper examines the recent noticeable rise in parents and carers in England, deciding to home school their children. This rise has been attributed to schools advising parents with ‘difficult’ ...children, those with special educational needs or behavioural problems, that they have a choice; home educate or their child will be permanently excluded. Also, there is a rise in parents removing children from schools due to bullying, school refusal and general unhappiness with school regimes and demands made on learners. The paper discusses causes of this increase in elective home schooling and examines the policy changes proposed and implemented by successive governments. Recently, concerns have arisen over what type of education is being offered to children by poorly educated parents, the rise of so called temporary schools in unsuitable buildings, concerns over religious indoctrination and the lack of a broad and balanced curriculum being offered, which could result in a lack of future employment opportunities for students. Certainly, a new approach is urgently needed if children’s futures are to be protected.
In the COVID-19 crisis, the science of learning has two different responsibilities: first, to offer guidance about how best to deal with the impact of the current situation, including lockdown and ...home-schooling; and second, to consider bigger questions about what this large-scale educational experiment might mean for the future. The first part of this Viewpoint summarises advice for parents on mental health, and on becoming stand-in-teachers. The second part, taking the longer view, considers the potential negative impact of the COVID-19 crisis in increasing inequality in education; but also the potential positive impact of driving innovations in technology use for educating children.
Millions were affected by COVID-19 school closures, with parents and schools caught unprepared. Education is expected to play a role in creating equal opportunities, so transferring schooling ...responsibilities to families may have increased learning inequalities generated by family backgrounds. We examined the time students spent on home learning and explored the role of the schools’ distance teaching provision in explaining differences traditionally attributed to parental education, eligibility for free school meals, ethnic background and single parenthood. Using the Understanding Society COVID-19 dataset, we found children who received free school meals, single-parent families and children with parents with lower formal education qualifications and Pakistani or Bangladeshi backgrounds spent significantly less time on schoolwork. However, schools’ provision of offline and online distance teaching and homework checking significantly increased the time spent on learning and reduced some inequalities, demonstrating the policy relevance of digital preparedness to limit learning loss in school closures.
To slow down the spread of the COVID-19 virus, schools around the world were closed in early 2020, transferring children's scholastic activities to the homes and imposing a massive burden on parents ...and school-age children. Using data of a 21-day diary study conducted between March and April 2020 in Germany, this work examined whether (a) distance learning and (b) parents' involvement therein were associated with negative parent-child interactions and affective well-being of parents and children, over and above the effect of daily stressors. Participants were 562 parents (489 mothers, Mage = 42.79, SDage = 6.12, range = 25-63) most of whom were married (n = 382, 68.0%). They responded to the daily items with respect to the youngest child living in their household (Mage = 9.74, SDage = 2.81, range = 6-19). On days when children were working on school tasks, parents reported more negative parent-child interactions as well as lower parental and child positive affect and higher child negative affect, but not higher parental negative affect. Moreover, days when parents were more heavily involved in learning (i.e., when children worked less independently) were days with more negative parent-child interactions, lower parental and child positive affect, and higher parental and child negative affect. Negative parent-child interactions were linked to lower affective well-being of parents and children, and partially accounted for the relation among daily stressors and affective well-being. The present work highlights the need for measures to better support school-age children and their parents during distance learning.
Parents' everyday realities of enforced home-schooling during COVID-19 may offer important insights into strengths and weakness of education systems. This article presents findings from a qualitative ...study involving parents of primary-school-age children in England during the first 'lockdown'. Parents shared common concerns with routine, motivation, resources, support, and children's wellbeing, and responded creatively to the challenges they faced. We argue that focusing narrowly on 'learning loss' and getting 'back on track' may lead to impoverished educational experiences post-COVID-19, and that a broad, engaging curriculum with social and emotional wellbeing at its core will support children's thriving in an uncertain future.
A robust finding from research in high-income countries is that children living in resource-poor homes are vulnerable to difficulties with language and literacy but less is known about this ...association in low- and middle-income (LMI) countries. We present a meta-analysis of 6,678 correlations from studies in 43 LMI countries. Overall, the results indicate a small but significant association (r = .08) between home language and literacy environment and children's language and literacy skills. After examining a range of moderators, adult literacy practices and books-at-home had a significantly larger association with children's language and literacy skills than did home tutoring. Studies using customized measures demonstrated a more marked association between home attributes and children's outcomes (r = .14) than studies using a common measure across multiple sites (r = .06). Published studies showed significantly larger associations than unpublished studies, and countries with greater income inequality showed a larger association than relatively egalitarian societies. We conclude that the small overall association should not be taken as support for the absence of, or a vanishingly small relationship between the home learning environment and children's language and literacy skills in LMI countries. Rather, an important factor in detecting this relationship is that assessments must better reflect the nature of homes in different cultures to capture true variation in the population. Such contextually situated measurement would lead to an inclusive conceptualization of home learning environments and can better inform intervention programs to enhance children's educational success, a critical target for many LMI countries.
Public Significance Statement
Studies demonstrate that resource-poor homes render children vulnerable to difficulties with language and literacy. Here, we summarize data from studies conducted in low- and middle-income (LMI) countries. Our meta-analysis (based on 6,678 correlations; from 43 LMI countries) shows a small but significant association between the language and literacy learning environment in children's homes and their language and literacy skills. The association is more marked for the adult literacy practices and book resources in the home than for home tutoring, and when studies use locally situated measures. These sociocultural and measurement factors are crucial to consider in designing studies in LMI countries where many children are behind in literacy learning.
In early 2020, schools across Canada closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring parents to homeschool their children. We examined the association between homeschooling and romantic conflict among ...couples during the COVID-19 pandemic. Canadian couples (N = 756) completed online measures, including whether they were homeschooling, hours spent homeschooling, and romantic conflict during the month of April 2020. Two hundred ten couples (27.8%) reported that they were homeschooling their children during this period, with 173 (22.9%) couples homeschooling due to the pandemic. Multilevel regressions were used to examine the association between homeschooling status and romantic conflict, and actor-partner interdependence models (APIMs) were used to examine the association between homeschooling hours and romantic conflict among homeschoolers. In our APIM analyses, significant links between hours spent homeschooling and romantic conflict were observed, even when controlling for demographic variables. We found significant actor effects, where an individual's own homeschooling hours were positively related to the conflict they enacted toward their partner, and significant partner effects, where the partner's homeschooling hours were positively related to conflict received by the individual. Among all couples, we found significant positive associations between homeschooling status (i.e., nonhomeschooler or homeschooler) and both types of romantic conflict. However, these associations were nonsignificant when controlling for demographic variables. Our findings suggest the number of hours spent in homeschooling may be an important contributor to romantic conflict between partners during the pandemic. We discuss implications for schools and governments in providing additional support for families homeschooling children during mandated school closures.
The closure of schools worldwide in response to the COVID-19 pandemic required parents to undertake key pedagogical roles to support their children's education and movement to a remote, often virtual ...world of online teaching presented many challenges for families. For the parents of children attending special schools, the loss of educational, as well as therapeutic provision, added a further layer of complexity unique to this group. This paper presents findings from a Northern Ireland-wide survey undertaken during the first lockdown period. Using Hornby and Blackwell's model of parental involvement (PI), the paper describes parents' experiences relative to their child's needs, family circumstances and societal expectations, and the intersection of these with teacher relationships and the wider school community. The findings reveal those factors that facilitated and inhibited PI and makes suggestions for improvements at school and policy levels in the short and longer term. The results have relevance and reach beyond the Northern Ireland context and should contribute to international dialogue on the synergy between PI and the special school setting.